I'm thinking especially of the use case of sharing for people who have not been accumulating dotfiles forever and haven't set up some kind of way to manage thei

I'm thinking especially of the use case of sharing for people who have not been accumulating dotfiles forever and haven't set up some kind of way to manage their dotfiles in version control. (Heck, I don't myself have a system that I love for that, though it meets my basic requirements in that I can always ask Git exactly what changed.) So "add this one line to get my prompt" is then a much lower-friction suggestion than "copy this whole little script".